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Yvonne Craig as Batgirl (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The presence of a "Geek Out" section on CNN.com, as established and establishment a media outlet as one could ask for, suggests that, at least when it comes to page views, geek has entered the mainstream. However, a recent opinion piece by the writer and designer Joe Peacock suggests that there is still some growing up to do - and it is going to have to be in public.

Peacock's piece - titled "Booth Babes need not apply" - trots out the familiar trope of the "fake geek girl" - the woman who is pretending to be a geek for reasons of her own. We've seen this device before, many times - indeed, we saw it here on Forbes.com, with Tara Tiger Brown's "Fake Geek Girls - Go Away!". Kirk Hamilton of Kotaku - a real geek boy, to the best of my knowledge - said in response to that article:

Imagine: You meet a girl, and you get to talking. You talk about your jobs, your neighborhoods; you talk about your interests. As it turns out, the two of you are into a lot of the same things. This is cool! Wow, she likes the same obscure slasher flicks and retro video games that you do. How lucky for you both!

Wait. Be careful. This could all be a ruse. She could be... a Fake Geek Girl.

Oh no actually, false alarm. Turns out she's just a person who is into stuff to varying degrees. There's no such thing as a Fake Geek Girl.

Which is probably true, but conceals another point - the idea of the "fake geek girl", and the self-appointed geekquisitors rooting them out, are bad for business.

Faking it seriously

Of course, there are people who pretend to like things more than they actually do, for many reasons - popularity, protective camouflage, hoping to impress a member of the same or the opposite sex. Let those who have never feigned interest in a boss' account of the last nine holes cast the first stone.

A woman may be dressed as Batgirl, and yet not able to tell you if she is Barbara Gordon, Cassandra Cain or Stephanie Brown. That might be because she genuinely doesn't care, or because she has only just discovered Batgirl, and has nobody to get advice from.

And that might be because whenever she tries to talk about Batgirl, she gets the geekquisition on how deep her knowledge of the Batman mythos is, before being dismissed as insufficiently knowledgeable - a "fake geek girl" just looking for attention. Eventually, they will either learn to dress conservatively and keep quiet, or they will give up - either way, sales and brand equity are lost, for very little gain.

We need to talk about Batman

Which brings us back to Peacock, who reports:

There is a growing chorus of frustration in the geek community [cit. req.] with - and there's no other way to put this - pretty girls pretending to be geeks for attention.

San Diego Comic-Con is the largest vehicle, but it's hardly the only convention populated with "hot chicks" wearing skimpy outfits simply to get a bunch of gawking geeks’ heads to turn, just to satisfy their hollow egos.

One immediately curious thing here is that, for such a seasoned convention-goer, Peacock appears not to know what "booth babe" means - or possibly what booth babes are.

Of course, many of the the scantily-clad women at SDCC are there because they are "booth babes" in the generally understood, if still disparaging, sense of the term. They are models or event staff, full- or part-time, who have been hired and costumed by promoters in the belief that women in skimpy outfits will sell whatever product they are promoting.

There are ways to address this - the PAX events, for example, have a policy limiting the use and the appearance of these promotional models. Generally, I would like to see sexualized advertising in general more carefully controlled in supposedly family-friendly events, but I can tell the difference between the player and the game.

It is pretty clear that "booth babes" - in the conventionally understood sense - are not doing it to "satisfy their hollow egos". They are doing it because it is a paying gig, and it is a paying gig because someone not on the convention floor thinks they will encourage people on the convention floor to buy product, take and share photographs and generally further the interests of the brand.

(In a subsequent blog post, Peacock has explained that, for him and apparently his friends, booth babe "is a pejorative used at conventions to describe any guy or girl who doesn't actually care about the industry, the fiction, the fandom or the culture - they're just there to get attention or a paycheck." So, his usage is eccentric, and he is unaware of how eccentric it is, or this is a post hoc justification.

For the purposes of this discussion, this is not particularly relevant, however: he does not mention guys in skimpy outfits, or indeed remuneration in any currency apart from attention.)

The enemy within

So, if not actual, according-to-Hoyle booth babes, who is Peacock talking about? Happily, he explains:

I'm talking about an attention addict trying to satisfy her ego and feel pretty by infiltrating a community to seek the attention of guys she wouldn't give the time of day on the street.

I call these girls "6 of 9". They have a superpower: In the real world, they're beauty-obsessed, frustrated wannabe models who can't get work.

They decide to put on a "hot" costume, parade around a group of boys notorious for being outcasts that don't get attention from girls, and feel like a celebrity. They're a "6" in the "real world", but when they put on a Batman shirt and head to the local fandom convention du jour, they instantly become a "9".

They're poachers. They're a pox on our culture. As a guy, I find it repugnant that, due to my interests in comic books, sci-fi, fantasy and role playing games, video games and toys, I am supposed to feel honored that a pretty girl is in my presence. It's insulting.

I read this, and felt very sad. Sad for Peacock, but also sad for anyone who feels this way. The underlying premise here is that male geeks are so unattractive, indeed so collectively repulsive, that there is a 50% gap between what they will find attractive and the attractiveness standards of any given other human being.

A normal-looking woman will, simply by standing near geeks - people Peacock seems to believe to be only 66% as attractive as regular people - become a supervixen. From "OK, maybe" to "oh, X-baby!" in a single bound.

And, conversely, if a woman in a Batman shirt ever speaks to you at a convention without having first established her credentials, the correct response is immediate suspicion. After all, they couldn't be attracted to you, or just want a conversation. Chances are, they are after your attention.

If this is making your skin crawl, that's sort of the point. It's a pretty awful way to feel about one's own culture, before we even get into how it is likely to corrode one's feelings towards women.